City Council - Regular Meeting

Hello and welcome to On the Agenda, the City of Reno's podcast that brings City Hall into your commute or walk around the block. From council decisions and community projects to the programs and people who keep Reno moving, each episode takes a closer look at what's happening across the biggest little city and what it all means for you. I'm AJ from the City of Reno's communications team and joining me, as always, Reno City Manager, Jackie Bryans. Hello, Jackie.

Hi, AJ.

How are you today?

I am great. Thank you.

It's a little warm outside. It's too hot. Stay shaded.

Anything above 75 is too hot.

Right. I'm with you. Today, we will be joined by Reno Fire Chief Dave Cochran to discuss an interlocal agreement between Reno and Sparks that will have Chief Cochran oversee both the Reno Fire Department and the Sparks Fire Department. does this work is he getting double the pay does he now have to drive two trucks we'll get the answers to these and more but first let's hear what happened at the july 29th meeting of the arena city council and redevelopment agency board jackie what should listeners know about

Well, one of my favorite programs was approved for some extended funding, the Rapid Rehousing Program Agreement with Volunteers of America and grant acceptance from the Reno Housing Authority. So thank you very much to our partners in that space. We had a $3 million grant acceptance and we entered into a reimbursement agreement for the Water Reclamation Facility Dewatering Building Project. So grateful to our partners in that space as well.

Thank you, Jackie. If you want more information about these items and everything else discussed during the meeting, check out Reno.gov forward slash meetings. Now on to today's topic. At the last Reno City Council meeting, council entered into an interlocal agreement with the city of Sparks for executive leadership of their departments. Under the agreement, Reno Fire Chief Dave Cochran will serve as fire chief for both Reno and Sparks. While the departments will share a chief, they will remain separate organizations under the authority of their respective cities. So what does this all mean? Today, Chief Cochran joins us to explain how the shared fire chief model will work and what it can mean for firefighters, emergency response and residents throughout the region. And if he has to remember two passwords to two social media accounts now. Hello, Chief. Welcome. Oh, AJ, you nailed the high pressure that I'm going to be under. This is all unprecedented territory for us. It is. We've never been down here before. We've actually been down the road before of having you on our podcast. I'm going to shoehorn that segue into this. I'm number one with a bullet. Most podcasts I see at Reno.

You are at six appearances now, I believe is what it is. I am.

That's amazing. Your trophy is in the mail. Your recognition will be here very shortly. Back order. I understand. I understand. So let's get into today's topic. So let's start with the basics. What did the cities of Reno and Sparks approve and what led to the two cities to pursue this model?

We've been talking – we, the city of Reno and city of Sparks, have been talking about how we can collaborate and how we can be more efficient with the resources – our combined resources. And this was just an opportunity. I had a vacancy at Fire Chief and we thought – Here's an option that we can take, and let's see if it works. It's an interlocal agreement, which is what you do in Nevada. If two cities want to enter into an agreement, they enter into an ILA. We did that for a shared fire chief model. And talking about myself in the third person, I am not fire chief in that sense. That is you. You are the shared one.

He is me. That's correct. So- Some people will hear shared fire chief and assume maybe the two fire departments have merged or there's something going on. Can you clarify what changed under the agreement? And just as importantly, what remains separate? So what had changed?

The only thing that changed, I should say, is the fire chief position. So now I am the fire chief for the city of Reno and the city of Sparks. There's no other overlap currently in between the two cities. We didn't merge. We didn't consolidate anything. Those are certainly options down the road, but it would take city leadership, the respective city councils, labor groups, everybody who has a stake in those concepts would have to be involved. And we will involve them if those opportunities come up.

Because that's a bigger thing. That's like all kinds of stuff has to change. So people would know if it was happening, basically.

It is a bigger thing. And, you know, that is a concept that we want to explore. The Fire Chief one was easy because we can do that at the top level. And, of course, even though they don't necessarily have a stake in it, we include the labor groups. We brief counsel. City leadership is involved. Legal course is involved. So we put a lot of work and effort into this on the front end to make sure that when we launched it, it would be ready to go. And we think that will pay off, pay dividends.

in the long run because we'll do the same approach as other opportunities come up oh nice so uh as you were talking about with like just council decisions and all these different things that would have to happen um as chief of both departments you will be accountable to the city managers of both cities how will that dual accountability work when it comes to department operations and just decisions affecting both

So it'll be my responsibility to make sure that city managers, that I communicate with city managers, because the respective city managers are my respective bosses. So I now have two bosses, one in Sparks and one in Reno. I think the information flow and making sure that they are aware of everything that's going on will be the key. I think people reflexively think, but it's not true, that we're in competition. We're not trying to compete with Sparkfire. Sparkfire is not trying to compete with us. We're looking for opportunities to work collaboratively. Right. So most of what I do is going to be figuring out the path forward for things that we can do together and not, like I said, competing for separate resources.

I do like the idea of a competition.

Yeah. Ideally, we want no fires in general. Yeah, that'd be great. We all would. And if I could add, the real goal is to improve service to both communities, to Sparks and Reno. And when you can manage all the pieces, like I'll be in a position to do, and the pieces, of course, are the resources. It's the firefighters, the fire engines, all the equipment. You can deploy them more effectively and efficiently.

So on that, one of the goals of the partnership is to improve the coordination of resources. Sparks Mayor Ed Lawson – I don't want to speak for them because I don't know their business – but he had mentioned during the media event that they will reopen Sparks Fire Station 6. How could this all look in practice? You said you – We'll kind of have more of a bigger view of all the resources. And so how does that work? Exactly.

So in that specific instance, we looked at the resources that Sparks already has. They have slash had an ambulance out of station five. In addition to a truck, they have a couple of engines down at station one in addition to a truck. So we're just going to rearrange those resources. We're going to move the ambulance down to station one to help with the call volume there because that is the busiest station in Sparks. And we're going to move one of their engines out to station six, which is the one that's currently browned out. So we'll open that engine or that station as well. And that way we have resources deployed across all the stations throughout Sparks. That's great.

So Reno and Sparks already share some regional resources. What are those?

We do. There's some regional teams like the triad. The triad is the name that we give to the hazmat team. We also have things like the water entry team, search and rescue teams. Those are labor intensive, fiscally intensive. I mean, they cost money and it makes more sense to combine those into one team because they're the low frequency in terms of number of calls, high frequency in terms of risk. Oh, that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah. So I may be biased and this is going to sound like I'm being sassy and I swear I'm not. But how is the city of Sparks financially contributing to this?

I don't mean it to sound like that. Nope, that's a fair question and a reasonable one. So they're going to pay to the city of Reno 25% of my fully burdened salary. So that'll be their financial contribution, which the trade-off is Reno will get a little revenue from that. In return, Sparks is not paying the full cost of a fire chief. And so they're saving a little money. The goal, and we've had these conversations many times with both city managers in Reno and Sparks, is to not... We're not doing this with the intent or with the goal of saving money. The goal is to improve service, like I said before. So we'll reinvest that money into... maybe people, maybe equipment, maybe other resources so that we can raise the bar in terms of the level of service. This is just a welcome side effect almost of it. We'll call it that. Exactly. And I mean, we're looking for where we can be efficient, like I said, not saving money, but managing the money we have more efficiently. And if there's redundancies in this case, the fire chief position. I've said it many times, so I'm not breaking news. Do we need all the fire chiefs that we have in this area? And I'm referring to myself as well. Or can we be more efficient in terms of how we manage it? And kudos to Sparks and to the city of Reno for being willing to reach out and take what's an unprecedented step for this area and try this and see if it'll work.

I'm younger and I cannot recall a time that something like this has happened. So this is really...

It's historical. It's a historical thing. It is. In fact, I said at the council meeting yesterday, a lot of times in the fire service, you know, we're more alike than we're different from fire department to fire department. But I can't think of or point to another department that did this. And I'm not saying it never happened. It's not frequent. It's not common. And so, again, kudos to city councils for reaching out and being willing to take a risk with the goal of improving service to everybody.

Chief Cochran, thank you for joining us and helping explain how this works and how this is going to work for both cities and how this will benefit everybody. Is there anything else you want to let people know about with the fire department or anything else going on?

I would just say that I'm very excited about this. I'm very optimistic that this is going to achieve the goals that we set at the outset. And I think there's going to be opportunities that we'll be able to take advantage of going forward. Fantastic.

Chief Cochran, it's always a pleasure to have you on the agenda. Before we go, there is a Reno City Council meeting on August 12th, and Jackie has some agenda items that you may want to know about. Jackie.

Yes, and this council's continuing effort to support affordable housing. There will be a resolution declaring intention to sell city-owned property located at 14180 Mount Charleston Street to the Reno Housing Authority for the public purpose of supporting affordable housing. So we're excited about that to see what RHA is going to do there. There'll be a presentation discussion and potential adoption of the City of Reno's FY27-29 Strategic Plan. We have been working on that for quite some time, so many thanks to the members of the public who provided their input. And there will also be a presentation, discussion, and potential direction to staff regarding bill draft requests for the next session of the Nevada Legislature.

Thank you so much, Jackie, for the highlights of what's coming next. Listeners, don't forget to check out Reno.gov forward slash on the agenda for quick links to council agendas, past episodes of the podcast and links to sign up for the Reno report newsletter. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast and we will see you next time on the agenda.